Hello guys,
I have a scene with a FollowCamera and I need to switch between multiple targets. For some reason though, I cannot get to make the switch smooth. When setting lockedTarget directly it jumps from one position to another. I tried to make an animation with the "lockedTarget" property but it doesn't work. Maybe you guys could help me out?
PG: https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#9AXYDK#1
Thank you!

Hey guys,
is it possible to select a sprite (via actionManager or scene.pickSprite, whatever) so the sprite transparency is taken into account? For example, in this playground the sprite is a circle: https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#PVYYAQ
, but it is clickable on the invisible corners of the square image.
Is there any way to avoid that?
Thanks,

Hi guys,
After some previous attempts to solve some problems in our project, we saw that we were not getting anywhere so we decided that we needed a professional help.
This is the offer we published on the Upwork platform, so if anyone is seriously interested in completing the job, please contact us.
This is the text of the offer:
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Representation of a snow-covered mountain scene in Babylon.js Engine
The task consists of representing a snow-covered mountain landscape with forest and water bodies in Babylon.js.
The focus has to be made on the visual attractiveness while still offering high performance.
An example of a scene like that would be this one (Scene1), made in Three.js.
We are providing a basic scene (Scene2) made in Babylon.js, and the following improvements have to be made to this scene:
1) Implementing a GLSL Shader / Babylon.js Custom Material which accepts the following criteria:
Terrain Texture:
- Rocks: should be a procedural texture with a nice natural transition between the snow and the rock texture like in the Scene1.
- Water: should be the WaterMaterial provided by Babylon.js Material library.
- Snow: it is already acceptable in the Scene2, but any visual improvement is welcome.
If needed, the mask image for the texture mapping can be also provided as three separated alpha mask images, one for each type of texture.
Furthermore, it has to support a Dynamic Texture on top of the Terrain Texture, so that it should be possible to draw directly on the ground.
An example of this would be this scene (Scene3), implemented with ShaderBuilder :
The problem with this scene is that it lacks bump maps, fog and shadow effects.
There should be visual consistency across the most popular browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
If you have any questions, we're ready to answer them.
Thanks!

After some search on the forum, I think I could implement this using Dynamic Textures, like in this playground I found: http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#9U086#4
The next challenge would be combining TerrainTexture with DynamicTexture.

Hey guys,
I'd like to know if there is a way to represent an animated polyline moving from point A to point B on a mountainous terrain.
The idea would be to show a track like this: https://www.relive.cc/ , you can see it in the demo video.
I understand that this functionality does not exist in Babylon, and from what I've read, the Babylon.Ribbon only allows for vertices to change position but not for adding new vertices.
But anyways, what would be the steps for me to implement it from scratch?
Thanks!

Hi peeps, I've already published a similar topic not a while ago, but we couldn't really reach any conclusion: http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/32079-sprite-occlusion-for-performance/
I have this demo: http://devel.arinnova.com/tests/3dmaps/babylon_demo/
I'm trying to get a similar forest to this three.js scene: https://www.piste.io/#!/cortina . Notice how the forest is really dense and the FPS are really good.
What I've already tried without success:
1) Loading meshes instead of sprites and applying LOD mechanism resulted in very low FPS.
2) Using mesh instances instead of sprites, still very low FPS
2) Temechon kindly helped me and coded a LOD function for sprites, but unfortunately it was more or less the same FPS as without the LOD.
4) Showing all the 54k trees, but using a particle system instead of sprites, which helped to reduce the draw calls, but the FPS were still low.
5) I've implemented a "poor man's LOD". I separated the 54k trees into 9 chunks, each chunk corresponding to a specific area. Then at every frame I calculated the distance from the camera to the central point of each area. If it was close enough to the camera, I showed the area trees and if not, I removed them. This way at each frame I had to calculate distances to only 9 points instead of 54k points, which helped but visually it was not pretty at all. Even applying a brown texture on the terrain underneath the trees, the chunks of trees appearing and disappearing all at once are very noticeable.
6) I also reduced the tree image size to 128x128, just in case, but I'm not sure it had an effect on FPS.
Using an image of a pine tree or a leafy tree would create much more perception of a dense forest, but unfortunately I can't use those. The scene is a winter map of a specific real-world area with leafless trees and I'm trying to be as realistic as possible.
A silly idea I've also tried was using an image of a group of trees instead of an image of a single tree. It obviously looked fake, especially when rotating the camera.
Some other ideas that I've had but have not tried:
Solid Particle System -> as it has more effect on performance than a simple particle system and I've already tried that.
Octrees -> could this help me? I've read the tutorial but I'm not sure I understand how could I apply it to sprites.
I don't know how camera.maxZ works internally, but is there possibly any way to apply it only to sprites, so the nearest sprites only are visible? Could I implement my own camera that does this? tldr; I'd like to show ~200.000 trees in my scene with minimal performance drawback.
Thanks a lot in advance!

Thank you for your response!
I tried to do that, but unfortunately the performance is waaay worse with meshes, even using instances and LOD with small distance to the camera: https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#KBBWVT#1
With 10000 sprites it renders with 60 FPS on my computer, but using 10000 planes with instances and LOD results in 20 FPS